I WAS IN A MOVIE THEATER on Sunday afternoon, watching Inside Out 2 with my kids, when my phone began to vibrate with the news that Joe Biden was stepping down and, soon after, that Kamala Harris would almost certainly be the Democratic nominee. I sat in the cool dark room and tried to take in what was happening simultaneously on the screen in front of me and the brain inside of me: Anxiety, the emotion whose stated aim in the movie is to protect the heroine “from the scary stuff she can’t see,” and to “plan for the future,” since “the next three days could determine the next four years of our lives!” was producing a whirling, spiraling cloud of fear about how much was at stake and all the ways it could go wrong.
The texts and WhatsApps were coming in fast, swirling round me until they formed their own panicked tornado: I’m so excited and so afraid she can’t win. The racism, the sexism, the racism! The polls are iffy. This nation is not evolved enough for this. I am so scared. Can we even do this?
None of us knows if we can do this. And we are about to do it anyway. And the combination of those truths helped me, in those vertiginous few minutes, to not feel panic but excitement. I felt excited about the future for the first time in years.
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